1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments in accordance with the present invention pertain to concurrent electronic conferences and, in particular, a system and method to schedule and conduct concurrent electronic conferences.
2. Description of the Related Art
Meetings are often used in a professional or educational setting to disseminate information, such as via a setting such as a lecture, a talk, and so forth. The setting may be organized as a one-to-many meeting (e.g., a professor lecturing to students in a lecture hall), many-to-one (e.g., a briefing by several team members to one executive), or a mixed scenario (e.g., a panel discussion that includes both prepared remarks and a question and answer session).
Meetings may also be used to stimulate information and further discussion. For instance, discussion among researchers of a problem may stimulate identification of additional approaches to solve the problem.
Conduct of meetings can be facilitated via a meeting agenda. The agenda will generally help plan a meeting by identifying the topics to be discussed, and identify assigned participants for the topics and the roles or credentials of the assigned participants. The agenda may help participants and other meeting attendees to prepare for the meeting, making the meeting more productive as judged by information exchanged, decisions reached, and so forth. The agenda is useful to guide participants regarding the goals of the meeting and identify when the meeting may be straying from achieving the goals. Therefore, the agenda is a useful tool to help manage the meeting and make efficient use of the attendees' time.
A meeting agenda generally comprises a list of several topics, and the list is used to stimulate agenda-driven topic discussions. The topics may differ in the number and/or identity of preferred or required participants. Furthermore, a single participant may have different roles for different topics (e.g., a presenter for one topic, but a decision maker for another topic).
The meeting schedule may change dynamically during the course of a meeting. For instance, participants' schedules may change during a meeting. The agenda may be shuffled such that topics are moved around in the schedule, or added, deleted, or combined with other topics.
Meetings often include concurrent discussions. For instance, a complicated problem may include one or more subcommittees to study the problem or aspects of the problem in greater detail, after which the subcommittee is charged with a duty to report findings and recommendations to the full meeting. For example, at a standards meeting, subcommittees may be formed to study the relative technical merits of various proposed alternative solutions. Subcommittees may have their own agendas and quorum requirements apart from the agenda and quorum for the meeting as a whole. Subcommittees offer the opportunity for the meeting as a whole to benefit from the expertise and in-depth study provided by the participants of the subcommittee, without unduly using resources of the meeting attendees as a whole.
Various scheduling processes for generic meeting scheduling problems are known in the art, but the known processes suffer drawbacks. For example, the known processes consider meetings as independent events rather than fully considering interdependencies. Furthermore, the known processes do not address dynamic changes during meetings.
Agenda planning, meeting management, and the meeting itself can be assisted by or conducted via on-line tools. Examples of available tools include OpenMeetings, Avaya Web Conferencing System, Persony, web.alive, WebEx, Big Blue Button, and IDEAL Conference.
OpenMeetings is an open-source browser-based software application that allows a user to quickly set up a conference via the Internet. A user can use a microphone or webcam, share documents on a white board, share the computer screen and record meetings. OpenMeetings is available as hosted service or can be downloaded and installed on a server with substantially no limitations in usage or users.
OpenLaszlo is an open-source platform for development and delivery of multimedia-rich Internet applications. OpenLaszlo applications can be deployed as Java servlets, which are compiled and returned to the browser dynamically. This method requires that the web server is also running the OpenLaszlo server. Alternatively, OpenLaszlo applications can be compiled from LZX into DHTML or a binary SWF file, and loaded statically into an existing web page. This method is known as SOLO deployment. Applications deployed in this manner may lack some functionality of servlet-contained files, such as the ability to consume SOAP web services and Java RPC remote procedure calls.
Avaya Web Conferencing System allows users to set up an online data conference, in which users can communicate using a range of methods. Data conferencing, audio conferencing, and video conferencing are supported.
Persony web-based conferencing is a web and video conferencing application. Users can share a desktop display, give a sales presentation, see others using high-definition webcams, or conduct a webinar, all from a private web conferencing site. Participants can join a meeting via substantially any web browser and computer.
Avaya “web.alive” is an online subscription-based conferencing service that can be used for hosting meetings, leading training sessions, and so forth. A host subscription includes features needed to engage an audience online, and offers high-definition positional voice, file sharing, presentations, desktop sharing, co-browsing, avatar customization, web integration, self administration, etc.
Cisco WebEx is a web conferencing product that lets participants connect with other persons online in real time. WebEx combines desktop sharing through a web browser with phone conferencing and video, so participants see the same thing while a host conducts the conference.
Big Blue Button is an open source web conferencing system built using open source components in order to create an integrated solution that runs on a plurality of computing platforms.
IDEAL Conference is a product that integrates data and voice within standard web browsers. IDEAL Conference enables people to conduct meetings over the Internet from a computer with a network connection and a web browser.
A drawback of the known art is that they do not adequately support the interactions found in electronically-assisted meetings. For instance, there is little or no notion of agenda and topics. A moderator manually handles meeting dynamics (e.g., keeping the meeting focused and on-schedule), and concurrent discussions are handled manually by arranging for multiple meetings. Furthermore, existing web conferencing products make inefficient use of the participants' time. For example, a person who desires to participate in a portion of a meeting (e.g., a conference, public meeting, or the like) but who does not need to attend the entire conference generally has two options. First, the person can attend the entire meeting from start to finish. This will unnecessarily waste the person's time as topics are discussed that have little or no interest to the person.
Second, the person can estimate from a published agenda or the like when topics of interest will be discussed, and attend the meeting during the estimated times, with or without some buffer time for expected variations between the published agenda and an actual pace of the meeting. Disadvantages of this approach include that the actual pace of the meeting may differ from the published agenda, resulting in missing topics if the pace is quicker than expected and exceeds any built-in buffer time, or unnecessarily waiting if the pace is slower than expected and thereby wasting time. Or, the topics may be discussed out of order from the published agenda, which again results in missing topics.
Furthermore, in a large meeting, there may be topics that are of interest to non-overlapping groups of attendees. The overall meeting time can be shortened and concurrency improved by scheduling concurrent breakout sessions. Such breakout sessions may be scheduled in advance or scheduled in an ad-hoc manner, such that the breakout sessions are scheduled to start at around the same time, and scheduled to end at around the same time. A disadvantage of this approach is that it may be difficult to schedule breakout sessions having roughly equal length and appealing to substantially non-overlapping sets of attendees. The resulting subject matter division among the breakout sessions may be very granular, thereby reducing the achievable gain from the concurrency of the breakout sessions.
Therefore, a need exists to provide improved subject matter scheduling in a meeting and, in particular, for an improved system and method to schedule and conduct concurrent electronic conferences.